Big Ideas Small Businesshttp://www.businessinsider.com/category/big-ideas-small-business
en-usTue, 03 Mar 2015 18:32:33 -0500Tue, 03 Mar 2015 18:32:33 -0500The latest news on Big Ideas Small Business from Business Insiderhttp://static3.businessinsider.com/assets/images/bilogo-250x36-wide-rev.pngBusiness Insiderhttp://www.businessinsider.com
http://www.businessinsider.com/16-successful-entrepreneurs-give-advice-on-ideas-failure-and-balance-2013-816 Successful Entrepreneurs Give Advice On Ideas, Failure, And Balancehttp://www.businessinsider.com/16-successful-entrepreneurs-give-advice-on-ideas-failure-and-balance-2013-8
Sun, 01 Sep 2013 14:13:00 -0400Vivian Giang and Mike Nudelman
<p>The most successful people know a thing or two about how difficult it is to get to where they are. They know how to bring<span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">&nbsp;amazing ideas to life,</span><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">&nbsp;face difficulties, overcome failures,&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">and how important it is to trust along the way.</span></p>
<p>Below is an infographic compiling advice from the most driven entrepreneurs throughout various stages of their success.<span style="font-size: 15px; color: #000000;">&nbsp;</span></p>
<div><img src="http://static5.businessinsider.com/image/520d283e69bedd045500002b-800-7333/entrepreneur-1.jpg" border="0" alt="Entrepreneur Quotes" /></div><p><strong>SEE ALSO:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/what-successful-people-carry-every-day-2013-4" >27 Successful People Reveal The Things They Can't Live Without</a></strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/16-successful-entrepreneurs-give-advice-on-ideas-failure-and-balance-2013-8#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/meundies-live-video-crowdfunding-2013-8L.A. Underwear Site Wants To Help You Shop Online With Live Videohttp://www.businessinsider.com/meundies-live-video-crowdfunding-2013-8
Mon, 19 Aug 2013 16:09:00 -0400Max Nisen
<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><img style="float:right;" src="http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/520d6317eab8ea7d6b000014-480-/meundies-team.jpg" border="0" alt="MeUndies Team" width="480" /></span><a href="https://www.meundies.com/">MeUndies</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, a year-and-a-half-old L.A. apparel startup that's distinctly not old-fashioned, is asking customers to help it bring offline-style face-to-face, </span><a href="https://meundies.crowdhoster.com/help-us-build-the-online-store-of-the-future">real-time customer service</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to people shopping online.</span></p>
<p class="p1">The startup's strategy hits lots of the items small businesses use to compete with larger ones. It cuts out middlemen and sells exclusively online so it can dramatically reduce prices, despite selling a high-end product; employs a marketing campaign targeted at a young demographic; and uses the sort of subscription model that's been so successful for companies like Birchbox and Dollar Shave Club.</p>
<p class="p1">Now its new crowdfunding effort aims to build a system that will connect users via video, if they choose, to an actual human being who will walk them through their products, which include "The World's Most Comfortable Underwear" and other basics like t-shirts and socks for both men and women.&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1"><span>"We really wanted to take the retail model of shopping offline in a store and take it online. There are very few online stores that have that personal touch," CEO Jonathan Shokrian told Business Insider.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span>The company hopes this model of customer service will really differentiate itself from its competition. "We were not happy with the status quo of customer support," Shokrian said <a href="We%20were%20not%20happy%20with%20the%20status%20quo%20of%20customer%20support.">in a recent Bloomberg interview.</a></span></p>
<p class="p1"><span>The company chose to crowdfund customer service to do market research at no cost, to figure out if it was something that people were actually interested in using.&nbsp;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span>Small businesses and new startups frequently don't have the luxury of trying out a business and then folding if it doesn't work out. They need to be as certain as they can before making a bet. This is a way to reduce both the market and financial uncertainty for a new venture that nobody's really tried before.&nbsp;</span></p>
<p class="p1">Both the subscription model and this personal face-to-face online customer service are a bet that when people invest in higher quality basics like underwear, they'll keep coming back. Especially if they figure out the size and cut that works for them with the help of someone who really knows the product.&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1">The customer service reps will be able to walk people through the best sizes based on their build and what's on offer, along with what styles might be better for working out versus everyday wear, Shokrian says.&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1">The majority of the money customers contribute&nbsp;─ the company's hoping for $30,000 and has raised more than $10,000&nbsp;─ will go toward building out technology for the platform that will provide the video service.&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1">Rewards for people who help with funding range from products to (for the largest contribution) a fully stocked vending machine with underwear, socks, and shirts.&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1">The campaign's part of an ethos where the company thinks of itself as a tech startup as much as an apparel company, and is as focused on the shopping experience as on the product.</p>
<h2 class="p1">The biggest challenge</h2>
<p class="p1">"The biggest challenge is on the tech side, finding great talent," Shokrian says. "It's easy to find good people; it's really hard to find great people. For us the biggest challenge is making sure we use the dollars we've raised already through angel investors well, and making sure we're hiring people we feel will add the most value and help take us to the next level where we can raise our next round."</p>
<p class="p1">They face a huge amount of competition from bigger companies that can offer much larger incentives and benefits.</p>
<p class="p1">Upstarts have to rely on their vision to sell people who could easily work for more elsewhere.&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1"><span>"We want to be the next great basic apparel company both off and online," he says. "We're doing a lot of innovative things to get us there. We try to get people behind our vision, and once they see where we want to take it, people get excited."</span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&nbsp;</span></p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/meundies-live-video-crowdfunding-2013-8#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/16-successful-entrepreneurs-give-advice-on-ideas-failure-and-balance-2013-816 Successful Entrepreneurs Give Advice On Ideas, Failure, And Balancehttp://www.businessinsider.com/16-successful-entrepreneurs-give-advice-on-ideas-failure-and-balance-2013-8
Thu, 15 Aug 2013 15:16:00 -0400Vivian Giang and Mike Nudelman
<p>The most successful people know a thing or two about how difficult it is to get to where they are. They know how to bring<span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">&nbsp;amazing ideas to life,</span><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">&nbsp;face difficulties, overcome failures,&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">and how important it is to trust along the way.</span></p>
<p>Below is an infographic compiling advice from the most driven entrepreneurs throughout various stages of their success.<span style="font-size: 15px; color: #000000;">&nbsp;</span></p>
<div><img src="http://static5.businessinsider.com/image/520d283e69bedd045500002b-800-7333/entrepreneur-1.jpg" border="0" alt="Entrepreneur Quotes"></div><p><strong>SEE ALSO:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/what-successful-people-carry-every-day-2013-4" >27 Successful People Reveal The Things They Can't Live Without</a></strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/16-successful-entrepreneurs-give-advice-on-ideas-failure-and-balance-2013-8#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> <p>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/follow-up-questions-end-job-interview-2015-1">7 smart questions to ask at the end of every job interview</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/mentors-give-the-most-efficient-advice-2013-8Startup Competition Winners Say Mentorship Is The Key To Efficiencyhttp://www.businessinsider.com/mentors-give-the-most-efficient-advice-2013-8
Tue, 13 Aug 2013 15:55:26 -0400Alexandra Mondalek
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><img style="float:right;" src="http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/52026cd7eab8eaaa54000002-480-/wediditjpg-2.jpg" border="0" alt="WeDidIt.JPG" width="480" />Sulaiman Sanni, co-founder of nonprofit crowdfunding platform </span><a href="http://wedid.it/">WeDidIt</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, says finding a mentor early is the best way </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;" id="docs-internal-guid-3d43bcfc-5448-778a-9668-64cd4c67dc36">startups can focus on the things that really matter.</span></p>
<p><span><span><span id="docs-internal-guid-3d43bcfc-5451-4fe3-d59a-7ada9ada78ad"><span>"You&rsquo;d spend less time, not waste weeks, when you have someone who has already been there and done that to say, &lsquo;Hey, this isn&rsquo;t actually that important. You might as well make a decision now and move on,&rsquo;" Sanni told Business Insider.</span></span></span></span></p>
<p>Moving on is exactly what Sanni and co-founder Ben&nbsp;<span>Lamson have done for the past two years, as they've expanded their startup from a fledgling business idea into a competition-winning service.&nbsp;</span></p>
<p><span>Launched in 2011,&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">WeDidIt&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">helps nonprofits crowdfund projects, much like Kickstarter does for individuals except WeDidIt takes the process one step further. Sanni and Lamson's company provides nonprofits with tools like fundraising coaches to help them successfully transform a video campaign into an executed project.&nbsp;</span></p>
<p><span>Sanni said that without the help of the mentorship he and Lamson found while participating in the Miller Lite Tap The Future competition last year, they would have been lost.</span></p>
<p><span><span id="docs-internal-guid-3d43bcfc-5483-d05b-6a93-df434fea8290"><span>"As an entrepreneur, in the early months, you&rsquo;re doing things based off of your assumptions.&nbsp;<span>You have no idea if real customers will like your product,"&nbsp;</span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">Sanni said. "If you can get involved with a business competition where people are assessing your business plan to let you know that you&rsquo;re on the right track, and on top of that give you some startup capital to put your idea into action, that&rsquo;s golden."</span></p>
<p><span><span><span>One year later, WeDidIt is helping other startups by acting as judges for this year's competition, alongside business mogul and Shark Tank investor Daymond John.&nbsp;</span></span></span></p>
<p><span>The competition, which spans over the next three months, ending with the national final round in December, awards one entrepreneurial team a grand prize of a $250,000 business development grant.&nbsp;</span></p>
<p><span>Though Sanni and Lamson said that they're in the midst of seeking out additional venture capital of their own, they're happy to share what they've learned in the last year with the competition's participants.&nbsp;</span></p>
<p><span><span id="docs-internal-guid-3d43bcfc-5490-0652-929b-7efdfb31bda1"><span>"Work quickly and learn from your mistakes," Lamson said. "Focus on things that are moving your business forward. If they&rsquo;re not moving your business forward, they&rsquo;re not worth it."</span></span></span></p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/mentors-give-the-most-efficient-advice-2013-8#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/noodle-ceo-john-katzman-2013-8Princeton Review Founder Is Plotting Out The Future Of Educationhttp://www.businessinsider.com/noodle-ceo-john-katzman-2013-8
Mon, 12 Aug 2013 09:28:00 -0400Alexandra Mondalek
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/51e69af2eab8ea1930000020-480-360/john-katzman.jpg" border="0" alt="John Katzman" width="480" height="360" /></p><p>The American higher education system is a <span>dysfunctional</span>&nbsp;money-sucking machine, according to John Katzman, <a href="http://www.noodle.org">Noodle Education</a> CEO.&nbsp;</p>
<p><span id="docs-internal-guid-4c832564-ecdb-79e6-04c7-16aedbaf0a4f">"If you look at the increase in tuition in higher ed in the last thirty years, it makes the housing bubble look like a pimple," Katzman said. "In a sense, [universities] are working to create the iron lung machine. They&rsquo;re looking to build something that can&rsquo;t possibly be the right answer. The right answer is that we have to dramatically lower tuition, while improving quality."</span></p>
<p><span>Katzman is best known as the founder of test prep and admissions consulting company The Princeton Review.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">He founded Noodle in 2011 with the aim of helping to navigate the complex web of educational resources.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">"I&rsquo;ve come to realize that as frustrating as it is for education providers, universities, schools, tutoring companies, fitness instructors, anybody to find students, it is equally frustrating for parents and kids to find the right education," Katzman said. "It just struck me that that was fixable."</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">Noodle offers a comprehensive gateway for educators and students, helping users find the right schools, tutors, and tutorials for them. &nbsp;</span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">For example, a prospective graduate student can look up different schools in their area or abroad based on price, field, and type of program. The goal of the Noodle search is to help students find the tools that are the right fit for them, instead of the tools that are the most well-known. A key to the business are the</span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">&nbsp;alliances that Katzman built nationally to pool resources into one, sleek portal.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">Katzman argues that better information is the first step to reform.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">"</span><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;" id="docs-internal-guid-4c832564-ecd9-c6b9-faba-96832bc5e639">The technologists can&rsquo;t figure out how to work with the educators," Katzman told us. "The educators can&rsquo;t reach the right students and parents ... if you can clarify it, find a way for everybody to find everybody, you&rsquo;re going to get better learning, better innovation, and you&rsquo;re going to get lower costs."</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">Katzman expects that online education will be a big part of the solution.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">"[In online classes] the professor's time is spent teaching a small number of students, and every moment you&rsquo;re together is a dialogue," he said.</span></p>
<p>Noodle represents one of many ways that online education tools are disrupting the university system,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/clay-christensen-higher-education-on-the-edge-2013-2">a</a><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/clay-christensen-higher-education-on-the-edge-2013-2">s&nbsp;forecasted by Harvard Business School Professor&nbsp;Clayton Christensen</a>. Change is coming and this company could help students find their way forward.</p><p><strong>SEE ALSO:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/online-courses-are-challenging-college-classes-2013-6" >Online Courses Have Reached A Turning Point</a></strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/noodle-ceo-john-katzman-2013-8#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/entrepreneur-finds-co-founder-on-okcupid-2013-8HR Entrepreneur Found The Perfect Co-Founder Through OkCupidhttp://www.businessinsider.com/entrepreneur-finds-co-founder-on-okcupid-2013-8
Fri, 09 Aug 2013 15:32:00 -0400Max Nisen
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><img style="float:right;" src="http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/52051b816bb3f7f972000001-480-/kelsey-conophy-1.jpg" border="0" alt="Kelsey Conophy" width="480" /><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">On a mission to create a new way to match employees and employers, it was fitting that Kelsey Conophy used an unusual method for recruiting her co-founder.</span></span></p>
<p>The 2012 Parsons School of Design Graduate was looking for someone with both technical chops and a psychology background to complement her own design and business background.</p>
<p>She spent some four months searching in the usual ways: networking, going to Meetups, and reaching out on various professional sites, all to no avail.</p>
<p><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">After that, Conophy took the more unusual step of posting that she was looking for a potential co-founder with that particular experience on a profile on OkCupid, the popular dating site. Shortly after, she heard from Julian Diaz, who had studied both subjects at Penn and had similar frustrations with the recruiting world.</span></p>
<p><span>"Within a week of posting, I did have a few responses, some kind of sketchy. Luckily Julian Diaz responded ... we met up for dinner and hit it off," Conophy told us.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">The pair never dated, but they did work together to create&nbsp;<a href="http://www.workzeit.com/launch">workZeit</a>, a HR tech startup that uses data to analyze company culture. The company offers a</span><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">&nbsp;"cultural fingerprint analysis" that companies can run on applicants and their own workers through in order to create better matches, based on preferences and practices related to how the company measures performance, how they motivate people, the pace of work, and the social culture.</span></p>
<p>"Most people think companies know what their culture is, but a lot them don't. We've found that a lot of companies have a really hard time discussing what [their culture is] and finding out what they actually have," Conophy said.&nbsp;</p>
<p><span>About a year and a half into the Brooklyn startup's existence, clients include New York area companies like Annalect and Compstak.&nbsp;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em; font-size: 15px;">workZeit Is part of a growing group of companies attempting to <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/big-data-in-the-workplace-2013-5">bring more data to the HR process</a>, which has been about unscientific interviews and gut feelings for too long.</span></p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/entrepreneur-finds-co-founder-on-okcupid-2013-8#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/get-up-and-ride-bike-tours-in-brooklyn-2013-7How A Bike Tour Company Became The #1 TripAdvisor Activity In Brooklyn In Just Over A Yearhttp://www.businessinsider.com/get-up-and-ride-bike-tours-in-brooklyn-2013-7
Sat, 03 Aug 2013 09:43:21 -0400Alana Kakoyiannis
<p><a href="http://www.getupandride.com/">Get Up and Ride</a> is a Brooklyn based bike tour company that highlights off the beaten path sites and provides an insider perspective into what's cool in some of New York's hottest neighborhoods.</p>
<p>From stops at rooftop farm <a href="http://www.brooklyngrangefarm.com/">Brooklyn Grange</a> to a slice at Williamsburg's <a href="http://best.piz.za.com/">Best Pizza</a> restaurant, Felipe Lavalle, owner and tour director, has curated an authentic experience for tourists and locals.</p>
<p>Lavalle was working in cold call sales for two years, when he decided to quit his job in search of a more interesting profession.&nbsp;</p>
<p>While looking for a bike rental company for his out-of-town guests, which came up short, he realized there was a huge opportunity.&nbsp;</p>
<p>"I did a Google search for 'Brooklyn bike tour' and nothing came up, it didn't take much more than that to get the ball rolling," said Lavalle.</p>
<p>After a year and change, trusting his gut instinct has paid off. Get Up and Ride is currently ranked #1 on Trip Advisor's list of activities in Brooklyn.</p>
<p>Hear more about his story, get advice on building and sustaining partnerships in a shared economy and check out the stunning sites in the video below.</p>
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<p><em>Produced by Alana Kakoyiannis. Additional camera by Justin Gmoser</em></p><p><strong>SEE ALSO:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/one-kings-lane-ceo-doug-mack-leadership-style-2013-6" >The Management Secrets That Got One Kings Lane To $200 Million In Revenue In Just 3 Years</a></strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/get-up-and-ride-bike-tours-in-brooklyn-2013-7#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/get-up-and-ride-bike-tours-in-brooklyn-2013-7How A Bike Tour Company Became The #1 TripAdvisor Activity In Brooklyn In Just Over A Yearhttp://www.businessinsider.com/get-up-and-ride-bike-tours-in-brooklyn-2013-7
Wed, 31 Jul 2013 12:40:00 -0400Alana Kakoyiannis
<p><a href="http://www.getupandride.com/">Get Up and Ride</a> is a Brooklyn based bike tour company that highlights off the beaten path sites and provides an insider perspective into what's cool in some of New York's hottest neighborhoods.</p>
<p>From stops at rooftop farm <a href="http://www.brooklyngrangefarm.com/">Brooklyn Grange</a> to a slice at Williamsburg's <a href="http://best.piz.za.com/">Best Pizza</a> restaurant, Felipe Lavalle, owner and tour director, has curated an authentic experience for tourists and locals.</p>
<p>Lavalle was working in cold call sales for two years, when he decided to quit his job in search of a more interesting profession.&nbsp;</p>
<p>While looking for a bike rental company for his out-of-town guests, which came up short, he realized there was a huge opportunity.&nbsp;</p>
<p>"I did a Google search for 'Brooklyn bike tour' and nothing came up, it didn't take much more than that to get the ball rolling," said Lavalle.</p>
<p>After a year and change, trusting his gut instinct has paid off. Get Up and Ride is currently ranked #1 on Trip Advisor's list of activities in Brooklyn.</p>
<p>Hear more about his story, get advice on building and sustaining partnerships in a shared economy and check out the stunning sites.</p>
<p><em>Produced by Alana Kakoyiannis. Additional camera by Justin Gmoser</em></p><p><strong>SEE ALSO:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/one-kings-lane-ceo-doug-mack-leadership-style-2013-6" >The Management Secrets That Got One Kings Lane To $200 Million In Revenue In Just 3 Years</a></strong></p>
<p><strong>Follow Us:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/businessinsider" >On YouTube</a></strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/get-up-and-ride-bike-tours-in-brooklyn-2013-7#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/5-acre-farms-business-strategy-2013-7Northeastern Startup Is Making It Easier To Get Farm Fresh Foodhttp://www.businessinsider.com/5-acre-farms-business-strategy-2013-7
Mon, 29 Jul 2013 14:36:00 -0400Max Nisen
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/51f0509becad04eb7a000009-480-/dan-horan.jpg" border="0" alt="Dan Horan" width="480" /></p><p>Five Acre Farms CEO Dan Horan took his time coming up with a plan to disrupt big agribusiness.</p>
<p><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;"></span><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">After starting his own organic farm in 1990, he spent nearly 20 years refining his vision, pivoting from an initial plan to own or franchise many small farms to a more efficient plan to partner with farmers and distribute local farm products in supermarkets.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">The Yale School of Management graduate, who was&nbsp;<span>a general manager at Gourmet Garage from 1995 to 1999 and the</span></span><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">&nbsp;CEO of Papaya King from 1999 to 2010, knows the importance of having a clear idea.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;"><span>"Simplicity is really important," Horan tells Business Insider. "It's got to be simple, and sometimes to make something simple you have to really, really study everything about it. It might turn out to be complex, but you have to present it simply, particularly when it comes to people: when people buy something, they don't want a lecture."</span></span></p>
<p>Horan shared more insights into his philosophy and Five Acre Farms in the following interview.</p>
<p><strong>Business Insider: How'd you come to start this particular business?</strong></p>
<p>Dan Horan: It's a thing I've been thinking about for a long time. I got out of college almost 25 years ago and started an organic vegetable business, and when I went to business school I had this little model in my head of a regional food company. It was actually my application essay. A little more than three years ago, after I finished my last job and we sold the company, I decided to start it up. With some modifications I came up with Five Acre Farms.</p>
<p><strong>BI: How has the current business evolved from your original idea?</strong></p>
<p>DH: The original idea for Five Acre Farms was a little model for how you could make a living on a five acre farm near busy urban centers, almost like a franchise. I thought I could have 1,000 of these things all over the place, and that they would produce vegetables and maybe some eggs that they would sell directly. Then there would be a 15 to 20% surplus that they would give to this central brand called Five Acre Farms that would then have a supermarket presence.</p>
<p>The more I thought about it, the more I realized that there were a lot of moving parts. I was really going to have to have an institute where I was going to train everyone. Was I just trying to focus on a regional strength, or was I trying to reinvent the wheel?</p>
<p>Instead I took the other approach. What's out there now that is not being properly served by the market? Where are the inefficiencies? I saw a lot of supply out there, and I made a list of all of the problems and all of the products in the Northeast because this is where I'm from.</p>
<p>So the idea went from starting new businesses to just starting one business with the existing supply. It was really just simplifying what was probably a much-too-complicated idea.</p>
<p><strong>BI: The business model is to bring more scale and consistency to local food?</strong></p>
<p>DH: I don't know if consistent is actually the right word. The idea is that we find farms using sustainable practices and bring their goods directly to the market under the brand of Five Acre Farms. It's much more about connecting the consumer to the farmer.</p>
<p>As it turns out there's a lot of very high-quality stuff out there that just gets thrown into the commodity market. If you know how to buy properly you can keep it out of the commodity market and make it more accessible to people. The reason why I say that I don't know if consistency is actually [the right word], is that a lot of the farms are slightly different. I think what happens is that you get a really authentic taste rather than one that's necessarily consistent.</p>
<p>But certainly availability, that's a big thing. We want somebody to be able to go into a supermarket 365 days a year and find good, local products. That part of it is fairly new in the Northeast &mdash; it shouldn't be but it just is.</p>
<p><strong>BI: You guys sell products that are local and sustainable, but not organic. Do you get any backlash from that?</strong></p>
<p>DH: Not really. I started organic farming in 1990 so I've been around organic food for a long time. You can't out-left me. I understand what organics is, but I also start with the premise that if organic food and conventional food were the same price, no one would buy conventional food.</p>
<p>There's some halo around organics but they've got a pricing problem. About 5% of the food out there is produced organically and that doesn't account for the fact that there are a lot of great farmers out there doing good things that may not follow exactly organic processes.</p>
<p>We haven't really had much tension in that department. If someone really wants to buy organic that's fine, I applaud them. If someone wants to buy conventional, that's fine too. I think the fact of the matter is that the major decision-point here is based on price. That might make some people uncomfortable, but I think the evidence bears that out. It has to be affordable and that has its own definition to each person. We really focus on having high quality, then being able to translate what are very complicated agricultural processes into very simple things that people can understand.</p>
<p>As it turns out, if it's fresher, it usually tastes better, so we usually put a high premium on taste and then worry less about the labels and allow accessibility to information.</p>
<p>If people want to know exactly what our farmers are doing they can learn that and if they don't like that then that's fine. This is not a panacea by any means but certainly transparency is as important as whether its sustainable, conventional, organic or whatever you want to call it.</p>
<p><strong>BI: You've spent time working on a farm, in supermarkets, and in the restaurant business. What lessons did you pick up?</strong></p>
<p>DH: I was in the supermarket business for a few years in the mid &rsquo;90s with a place called Gourmet Garage that's now throughout the city. I got exposed to a huge number of products, what people look for and like, how things are merchandised, the importance of packaging, and the importance of just having a consistent delivery process. The logistics of the food business are very important to the success of a product.</p>
<p>In the restaurant business, I was the CEO of Papaya King, and it was a fantastic experience &mdash; it's a New York icon. There, you really get a sense of what the public wants and likes and doesn't like, the importance of price, and the importance of having a good crew. I got a real sense of how important location is for store success and just for the range of products that are out there.</p>
<p>At Papaya King, you can have someone get a fresh-squeezed orange juice or papaya drink that's all real and then wash it down with a chili cheese dog. The buyer might be a 65-year-old woman with a pearl necklace. It just defied description, the customer base. It was everyone. It also showed you that if it tastes good, that's what's really important.</p>
<p><strong>BI: What's the best piece of advice you've ever gotten?</strong></p>
<p>DH: Simplicity is really important. It's got to be simple, and sometimes to make something simple you have to really, really study everything about it. It might turn out to be complex, but you have to present it simply, particularly when it comes to people: when people buy something, they don't want a lecture.</p>
<p>If they're buying milk, yes there's a small percentage of people who care desperately about the animal and the environment, but at the end of the day, they want their coffee to be brown and their cereal to have milk in it. They want it to taste good and they want it to be available. Simplicity is an incredibly powerful idea which I often muck up as I think a lot of other people do.</p>
<p><strong>BI: As a recent entrant to a huge market, how do you get in front of people?</strong></p>
<p>DH: That's probably our biggest challenge. It is a fully developed, fully mature market. The world was not waiting for us. If we disappeared in the next 10 minutes we would be lamented for about a second and people would go on with their lives. Being noticed is very tough; there are 50,000 items in the supermarket, so how are people going to find you?</p>
<p>To get in front of people, that's expensive. We are a team of 12 now and we're out there sampling and demoing, making sure people can taste it and talking to people about it and trying to spread the word through social media. Marketing is very challenging but keeping it simple and having an always great-tasting product is a big help. Our egg business took almost two years to take off and it really has taken off, whereas the milk business right off the bat was pretty successful, and the apple business has been pretty successful.</p>
<p>But you have to be patient, you can't take for granted that anyone knows about you or even cares. You have to keep at it every day. It seems like a clich&eacute;, but until we have real, wide scale, we can't take advantage of a lot of more traditional media outlets. We're probably in 100 places. If we were to put something on the radio, tv, or a billboard, we'd be talking to 99% of the population that couldn't find us, so it's probably not the best way to spend our money.</p>
<p><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">Picking the way to get in front of people is a constant challenge.</span></p>
<p><strong>BI: What are your plans for the future?</strong></p>
<p>DH: There are a lot of people in the Northeast and one of our core missions is to keep farmers farming, so we want to grow our customer base &mdash; the customer base of both stores and users.</p>
<p>So, more availability and hopefully bringing in new products, but it takes a lot to come out with a new product because you don't just snap your fingers and have something. I have to be consistent with the brand, the price positioning has to be correct, the quality has to be right, there has to be a need for it &mdash; there are a lot of logistics that go into it.</p>
<p>Milk is something the public buys three times a week, the public buys eggs probably once or twice a week, apple juice people generally buy once a week, apple sauce, maybe every three weeks, but these are items that people need all the time. They're ubiquitous &mdash; you can buy milk almost anywhere, which is pretty amazing, so there's a lot for us to do here.</p>
<p>We're certainly going to come out with new products, but really we're mostly just going store by store expanding throughout the Northeast. We're moving into New Jersey, we're in Westchester, we're moving into Long Island, we're in southern Connecticut, Queens, Brooklyn &mdash; there are just so many outlets.</p>
<p><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">Certainly we think this could be a national idea, but we're going to start here first.</span></p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/5-acre-farms-business-strategy-2013-7#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/one-kings-lane-revenue-strategy-2013-6One Kings Lane CEO Doug Mack Reveals How His Team Achieved An Impossible Goalhttp://www.businessinsider.com/one-kings-lane-revenue-strategy-2013-6
Mon, 08 Jul 2013 16:38:00 -0400Daniel Goodman
<p>In 2011, less than two years old, home decor flash sales site One Kings Lane thought it was going to do $70-75 million in revenue, an aggressive goal for the young company.&nbsp;</p>
<p>And then the team decided to up the ante... What if they aimed for $100 million in revenue?</p>
<p>CEO Doug Mack recently told us how his team prepared for, and then beat what seemed an improbable revenue goal. Watch below.</p>
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<p><em>Produced by Daniel Goodman and Alana Kakoyiannis</em></p><p><strong>SEE ALSO:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/one-kings-lane-ceo-doug-mack-leadership-style-2013-6" >The Management Secrets That Got One Kings Lane To $200 Million In Revenue In Just 3 Years</a></strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/one-kings-lane-revenue-strategy-2013-6#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/mehdi-yazdanpanah-nominated-as-best-small-business-owner-2013-7Mehdi Yazdanpanah Has the Coolest Small Business In Americahttp://www.businessinsider.com/mehdi-yazdanpanah-nominated-as-best-small-business-owner-2013-7
Tue, 02 Jul 2013 13:31:00 -0400Max Nisen
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/51cdb9716bb3f78769000012-480-/nauga-needles.jpg" border="0" alt="Nauga Needles" width="480" /></p><p>Of all the <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/invaluable-advice-from-18-of-americas-top-small-business-owners-2013-6">small business owners nominated for a big national award</a>, b<span>y far our favorite was Kentucky's Mehdi Yazdanpanah and his company Nauga Needles.</span></p>
<p><span><a href="http://nauganeedles.com/">Nauga Needles</a> makes "nano-needles" &mdash; incredibly small metal wires sharp points that are being used by researchers to manipulate, probe, and measure things on a microscopic level.</span></p>
<p>The whole thing started after Yazdanpanah, an Iranian immigrant, made an accidental and fortunate discovery in a lab at the University of Louisville, where he was a Ph.D. student in electrical engineering.</p>
<p><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">"It was actually in 2004 where, by accident I found that silver and gallium react with each other at room temperature. Through this reaction, mother nature makes a nano-needle-like structure," he says.</span></p>
<p>Once the graduate student figured out how to make needles form individually, he immediately saw the potential.</p>
<p>Yazdanpanah didn't come to America to start a business.</p>
<p><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">"I was a foreign student here on a visa, and I had $500 in my savings account, so there was no way, in my imagination, that I could some day be a businessman," he says.</span></p>
<p>There was a language barrier, a culture barrier, and an experience barrier.</p>
<p>"It was scary at the beginning to come here because it's a very different country, but the transition ended up being so smooth. That's why they call it the land of the American Dream," he says.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">What helped him transition from scientist to CEO was a </span><a href="http://www.kauffman.org/newsroom/kauffman-foundation-announces-first-class-of-postdoctoral-entrepreneurship-fellows.aspx">Kauffman postdoctoral fellowship</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> in 2009, which provided funding and taught him the basics of running a business.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em; font-size: 15px;">There are also certain advantages to living in Kentucky, like much cheaper costs than in Silicon Valley.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em; font-size: 15px;"></span><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">He was able to hire people from the University of Louisville who were already familiar with the technology, though he says talent can be rough, particularly on the business side.</span></p>
<p><img class="float_left" src="http://static5.businessinsider.com/image/51cdb5ebecad04ed5100001c-1200-706/nnteam2.jpg" border="0" alt="Nauga Needles" width="480" /><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><span>Nauga Needles already</span>&nbsp;has six full-time and four part-time employees, with some work outsourced.&nbsp;The long-term goal is to manufacture everything in Louisville.</span></p>
<p>The location made finding private funding difficult, however, even as the Internet made it possible to sell product everywhere. Without the luxury of big investments, Nauga Needles had to&nbsp;<span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">start selling right away.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;"></span><span style="line-height: 1.5em; font-size: 15px;">Eventually the company got a loan from Louisville for equipment, won a business plan competition, got funding from the state of Kentucky, and won a grant from the National Science Foundation.</span></p>
<p>"It took all of this together. The best part of it was because we had the sales that were helping us to grow organically. Now we are at the point where we can raise money, but our backs are not against the wall," Yazdanpanah said. "We have some breathing room and we're looking for the smart money."</p>
<p>Right now, their major customers are researchers in the semiconductor industry, biology, physics, and nano-mechanical engineering.</p>
<p>"W<span>e're making tools that enable researchers to do things in nano-scale," Yazdanpanah said.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">He thinks the applications will only grow. Right now, for example, he is working on a blood test kit that can detect and count cancer cells.</span></p>
<p>Nanotechnology is in its infancy right now, but the potential is huge.</p>
<p>"I like to say that I didn't get a Ph.D. to get a job, I got a Ph.D. to create jobs," he says. "And I hope that some day my company hires thousands of people if not hundreds of thousands. That's my dream come true."</p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/mehdi-yazdanpanah-nominated-as-best-small-business-owner-2013-7#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/kelvin-natural-slush-national-expansion-2013-6Trendy Slushies From New York Are Going Nationalhttp://www.businessinsider.com/kelvin-natural-slush-national-expansion-2013-6
Wed, 19 Jun 2013 09:23:38 -0400Alexandra Mondalek
<p dir="ltr"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><img style="float:right;" src="http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/51c08bd3ecad043138000005-480-/kelvin-natural-slush.jpg" border="0" alt="Kelvin Natural Slush" width="480" />Turning a drink that people associate with 7-11 into a trendy product is impressive.&nbsp;Growing a single food truck into a national wholesale business in three years is a masterpiece.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr">We talked to the ex-lawyers behind <a href="http://kelvinslush.com/">Kelvin Natural Slush Co.</a> to find out how it started and how they're doing so well.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">After meeting on their first day at a law firm, </span><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">Zack Silverman and Alex Rein</span><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">&nbsp;hit it off and soon began bouncing business ideas off each other.&nbsp;</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">Silverman told Business Insider that the original idea for Kelvin Natural Slush came from the two friends going out for drinks. After yet another mediocre frozen cocktail and the realization that they liked slushies better than Frappuccinos, &ldquo;w</span><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">e said, &lsquo;why can&rsquo;t we make a better, more grown-up, all-natural slush?'&rdquo;</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">They didn't leap right in. But eventually, the world gave them the push to get started.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr">&ldquo;We were working on securitization loans, which evaporated overnight. Because of the recession, Alex ended up getting laid off, and then we decided to take a chance on this idea,&rdquo; Silverman said.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Silverman joined full time last year after six years at his firm, despite having the potential to make partner. &ldquo;<span id="docs-internal-guid-3d7474da-57fb-4b8f-3df6-2d8afe98905b"><span>People were definitely pretty surprised ... we&rsquo;re both super happy. we both work super hard &mdash; in some ways harder than we used to,&rdquo; Silverman said.</span></span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span><span><img class="float_left" src="http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/51c08c406bb3f7b54300000b-3168-4752/kelvin_citrusmango_slush.jpg" border="0" alt="Kelvin Citrus Mango" width="400" />That's paid off in a big way. Their mixture of &ldquo;base flavors&rdquo; like tangy citrus and black tea with fresh fruit purees (a favorite combo is a citrus/tea &ldquo;Arnold Palmer&rdquo; with white peach mix-in)</span></span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&nbsp;built them a growing fanbase and hours-long lines at Brooklyn Flea's Smorgasburg.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">But the big break for the business came from moving beyond the truck. Food trucks aren't an easy business. They're ideal to get started, &ldquo;a&nbsp;<span id="docs-internal-guid-3d7474da-580d-02c7-3a35-d0b2c2c1b017"><span>cheaper, lean startup way&rdquo; to get going.</span></span></span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">But they have their limits.&nbsp;</span></p>
<p dir="ltr">Silverman described the food truck industry in New York as a bureaucratic &ldquo;nightmare,&rdquo; a sentiment echoed by a recent&nbsp;<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/12/magazine/the-food-truck-business-stinks.html?pagewanted=all&amp;_r=0">New York Times article</a>&nbsp;on the city&rsquo;s plateaued industry.</p>
<p dir="ltr">&ldquo;We&rsquo;ve had lots of parking tickets, we try to pay the meter but it&rsquo;s really hard. Last year, on the food truck, our engine blew up right in the middle of the season, Silverman said.&rdquo; Of course, in the middle of a heat wave. &ldquo;We would have made a lot of money. Basically, a $40,000 swing, with lost revenue, and a huge expense on the truck to replace the engine.&rdquo;</p>
<p dir="ltr">And people aren't terribly into slushes when it's cold out, making a store a difficult option too.&nbsp; &ldquo;<span id="docs-internal-guid-3d7474da-5806-3332-f139-a914f818759e"><span>Our retail business, the truck, all the outdoor stuff, completely shuts down by October. For a few years, we made zero dollars between October and the beginning of April,&rdquo; Silverman said.</span></span></p>
<p dir="ltr">Those difficulties, and the fact that the slush is a natural fit for alcohol, had the pair thinking about wholesale.&nbsp;<span id="docs-internal-guid-3d7474da-5808-ebbe-0f8a-f08ad3d87fa0"><span>&ldquo;Along the way, people would always bring alcohol to the truck and the cart, Silverman told us. &ldquo;We would always joke about it, but then people would literally show up with a flask or a mini-bottle, and we&rsquo;d be like &lsquo;whatever you do, we can&rsquo;t stop you.&rsquo;&rdquo;</span></span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">That trend, and the abundance of mediocre frozen margaritas in the world, led the pair to start reaching out to wholesale partners, bars, and restaurants. Then a massive partner reached out to them.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">A representative for Whole Foods, the Austin-based organic supermarket chain, offered them the opportunity to be featured in their stores.</span><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">&nbsp;</span></p>
<p dir="ltr">&ldquo;W<span id="docs-internal-guid-3d7474da-580f-2511-2f5c-7695c3c74896">e&rsquo;ll definitely take some luck on that one,&rdquo; Silverman said.&nbsp;</span></p>
<p dir="ltr">Not just luck, but a smart business shift. In 2012, wholesale revenue only accounted for a small fraction of the company&rsquo;s growth, according to Silverman. Since shifting the brand&rsquo;s focus from mobile to wholesale, however, profits have increased dramatically.</p>
<p dir="ltr">&ldquo;Year-to-date, wholesale has grown so much, so from a revenue perspective, [wholesale and mobile sales] are about even,&rdquo; Silverman said. &ldquo;We expect that by the end of the year, the wholesale will have grown to outdo the truck.&rdquo;</p>
<p dir="ltr">They're available in eight states at Whole Foods, and <a href="http://kelvinslush.com/location">bars and restaurants around New York.</a> &nbsp;</p>
<p dir="ltr">Talking about the company&rsquo;s future, Silverman said that plans included growth in the wholesale sector, targeting &ldquo;three top markets&rdquo;: Las Vegas, Miami, and Southern California.</p>
<p dir="ltr">&ldquo;We&rsquo;re not exactly sure when we&rsquo;ll enter those markets, and if we&rsquo;re going to expand the trucks, but for now, that&rsquo;s where we hope the evolution of the business will take us.&rdquo;<span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">&nbsp;</span></p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/kelvin-natural-slush-national-expansion-2013-6#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/why-data-is-the-oil-of-this-century-for-small-businesses-2013-1Data Is 'The Oil Of This Century' For Small Businesseshttp://www.businessinsider.com/why-data-is-the-oil-of-this-century-for-small-businesses-2013-1
Fri, 25 Jan 2013 12:09:00 -0500Max Nisen
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static5.businessinsider.com/image/50abe5a8eab8ea7d0e000003-400-300/roman-stanek.jpg" border="0" alt="Roman Stanek" width="400" height="300" /></p><p>In the past, "big data" as it's come to be called was mostly limited to big companies with whole business intelligence functions and massive investments.</p>
<p>Now, it's democratized to the point where you encounter it almost every day as a consumer, and&nbsp; tools are being developed for everybody from small businesses to individual salespeople.</p>
<p>We spoke to Roman Stanek, the <a href="http://www.gooddata.com/">founder and CEO of GoodData</a>, which is a 6-year-old company that focuses on taking all of the data people generate from the platforms they sell, market, and use to manage, and monetize it.</p>
<p>Because 80 percent of his customers are small businesses, we spoke to him about what big data means for small businesses and how they can get its benefits without breaking the bank.</p>
<p>The skepticism people had about the value of data, still present when Stanek started the company in 2007, has mostly evaporated.</p>
<p>"When we started out, the focus was not on data. The recent discussion about big data and analytics and visualizations of data &mdash; the big visible successes of things like the President's re-election and so on &mdash; they're all examples showing that people understand that data is really kind of the oil of this century," Stanek said. "It does feel like the right time and the right place."</p>
<p>There's one major trend that Stanek thinks has made data much more democratic and useful to small businesses. "Business processes are becoming more and more homogeneous," Stanek said. That means that more and more people are using particular data-producing tools to manage, for example, their sales.</p>
<p>Stanek has seen it as a buyer as well as a vendor. "I think that small businesses are not only hungry for technology, but they're also hungry for best practices, Stanek said. "I look at it not only as selling to small business but as a buyer. Let me give you an example. When we hire salespeople they usually come to us and say, 'Well I have to use Salesforce, and that's the only tool that I use.'"</p>
<p>That right there is what has made big data solutions affordable "The beauty of SAAS (software as a service) is that 100,000 users or customers of Salesforce are using Salesforce in more or less the same way. So we can actually build some sort of out-of-the-box solutions that are easy to deploy and easy to deliver, Stanek said. "Most small companies, they don't compete on customization of software, they compete on better services and selling their products and so on. So understanding what's essential and what's non-essential is key."</p>
<p>So big data for small businesses is about taking what you already have, and using tested benchmarks and best practices to get more out of it. You don't have to go out and discover what works, or build out a massive software system over your whole enterprise. Businesses can plug into something they already have, and make tweaks that make them better at sales or better at providing services.</p>
<p>It's cheaper because the learning curve's less steep. You're just improving upon processes you've already invested in, and you're getting the data itself from partners.</p>
<p>Big businesses can buy software or build out big custom solutions and then figure out best practices on their own. Small businesses don't have &mdash; and often don't need &mdash; that luxury.</p>
<p>Another of Stanek's key insights on what's made big data more accessible and democratic is the fact that people understand their own data. Salespeople, for example, will understand a visual representation of sales flow that might seem like nonsense to us. And when a best practice is illustrated with data that's intuitive, it makes it easier to get people to adopt it.</p>
<p>It's all part of a move from where data is in the hands of managers to where it's in the hands of every employee.</p>
<p>Small businesses need to think of big data not as an obligation to go out and buy a massive software suite and hire a data scientist, but to use what they already have to make money and become more competitive.</p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/why-data-is-the-oil-of-this-century-for-small-businesses-2013-1#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/workplace-culture-is-important-2013-1Workplace Culture Is More Important Than Anything Else http://www.businessinsider.com/workplace-culture-is-important-2013-1
Tue, 22 Jan 2013 13:48:00 -0500Aimee Groth
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/50fec35d6bb3f71e2300000a-400-300/working-employees-office-startup-6.jpg" border="0" alt="working, employees, office, startup" width="400" height="300" /></p><p>Companies sink or swim based on their internal culture. One bad hire can have a huge effect on morale, productivity, and ultimately, the bottom line.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.foundrygroup.com/about/">Brad Feld</a>, co-founder of startup accelerator <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/techstars" class="hidden_link">TechStars</a> and managing director at VC firm <a href="http://www.foundrygroup.com/">The Foundry Group</a>, says that too many startups focus on <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/hire-for-cultural-fit-over-competence-2012-12">hiring for competency over cultural fit</a>. "Many people default into choosing people who have high competence but a low cultural fit," he writes. "<strong>This is a deadly mistake in a startup, as this is exactly the wrong person to hire</strong>."</p>
<p>Instead, leaders should hire people who see the much bigger picture, and can truly help a company thrive by aligning their career goals with a company's values and mission.</p>
<p>One of the most influential leadership books in recent years, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Tribal-Leadership-Leveraging-Thriving-Organization/dp/0061251321">Tribal Leadership</a>, shows just how important culture is over nearly anything else &mdash; even a brilliant idea. According to the authors, there are five stages of leadership and culture, with the 5th leading to a "no fear" environment that inspires innovation and maximum productivity:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">"Tribal leaders focus their efforts on building the tribe &mdash; or more precisely, upgrading the tribal culture. If they are successful, the tribe recognizes them as the leaders, giving them top effort, cult like loyalty, and a track record of success. <strong>Divisions and companies run by Tribal Leaders set the standard of performance in their industries, from productivity and profitability to employee retention</strong>. They are talent magnets, with people so eager to work for the leader that they will take a pay cut if necessary."</p>
<p>Authors David Logan, John King and Halee Fischer-Wright lay out the dramatic effects of a positive culture with the right hires, including:&nbsp;</p>
<div style="overflow: hidden; color: #000000; background-color: #ffffff; text-align: left; text-decoration: none;">
<ul>
<li>Fear and stress go down as the "interpersonal friction" of working together decreases</li>
<li>People seek employment in the company and stay, taking the company a long way toward winning the war for talent</li>
<li>Organizational learning becomes effortless, with the tribe actively teaching its members the latest thinking and practices</li>
<li>People's overall health statistics improve. Injury rates and sick days go down</li>
<li>Most exciting ... is that people report feeling more alive and having more fun</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div style="overflow: hidden; color: #000000; background-color: #ffffff; text-align: left; text-decoration: none;"><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/zappos" class="hidden_link">Zappos</a> CEO <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/tony-hsieh" class="hidden_link">Tony Hsieh</a> runs his billion-dollar company based on similar "tribal" values. He says that, in the early stages of launching Zappos, "<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/tony-hsieh-making-the-right-hires-2010-10">bad hires cost us $100 million</a>." Now, Zappos hires and fires <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/tony-hsieh-zappos-company-culture-2010-10">based on whether someone is a distinct culture fit</a>.</div>
<div style="overflow: hidden; color: #000000; background-color: #ffffff; text-align: left; text-decoration: none;">&nbsp;</div>
<div style="overflow: hidden; color: #000000; background-color: #ffffff; text-align: left; text-decoration: none;">The key is knowing that no matter how ingrained a person is within a company, if they're adversely affecting morale, chances are they are also adversely affecting the bottom line.</div><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/workplace-culture-is-important-2013-1#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/robert-pozen-maximizing-productivity-while-scaling-2013-1How To Delegate Responsibility To Other Peoplehttp://www.businessinsider.com/robert-pozen-maximizing-productivity-while-scaling-2013-1
Fri, 18 Jan 2013 12:27:00 -0500Aimee Groth
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/507f1941ecad04fd2a000025-400-300/quicktime%20playerscreensnapz048.jpg" border="0" alt="robert pozen" width="400" height="300" /></p><p>Scaling a business is <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/aaron-schildkrout-how-to-build-a-startup-2013-1">an extremely nuanced process</a>: It takes a brilliant strategy, smart delegation and tons of hard work. To gain some insight on how to pull this off, we spoke with <a href="http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=220890">Harvard Lecturer Robert Pozen</a>, who offers some great tips on building an efficient workplace culture in his book <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/harvard-professor-robert-pozen-on-productivity-2012-10">Extreme Productivity</a>.</p>
<p>Here are the best parts of our conversation:<br /><br /> <strong>As you grow, managing well is really about effective delegation. How do you figure out what you still should be working on, versus what to outsource?</strong><br /><br />That depends a lot on the type of business you&rsquo;re with and types of people you&rsquo;re working with. The question isn&rsquo;t whether you're better at the function than anybody else. The question is, can you as the founder be the only person to do it? The classic problem as an entrepreneur is that they have a hard time delegating. But that&rsquo;s really crazy. Recruiting other executives is critical, so is dealing with customers and dealing with regulators. Those are functions that only the top founders can do.</p>
<p>The way you delegate is that first you have to hire people that you really have confidence in. You won&rsquo;t truly let those people feel a sense of autonomy if you don&rsquo;t have confidence in them.<strong> </strong>For example, you tell an employee they need to develop a new product in a particular niche. But if you go further and say they should go about it this way, then you&rsquo;re micromanaging and depriving that person of feeling any sense of control over their situation.</p>
<p>If you want to keep an entrepreneurial mindset within the culture, you've got to be ready for people to make mistakes &mdash; and they will. It's fine to make a new mistake once. You've got to be very tolerant of people making mistakes for the first time. But then if it happens again and again, you've got to have a discussion. <br /> <br /><strong> How do you balance strategic thinking against everyday tasks?</strong><br /><br />It's hard to answer the question in the abstract. There's a priority exercise that I urge people to go through (<em>discussed <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/harvard-professor-robert-pozen-on-productivity-2012-10">in our previous interview here</a></em>). What do you want to achieve? Who's the best person to do it? Make sure that your goals align with how you spend your time.</p>
<p>It's important to reduce the number of decisions you make every day (<em>because <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/dr-oz-how-to-spend-your-morning-2012-11">making decisions depletes energy and brain power</a>.</em>) Most people get overwhelmed by the insignificant decisions of their lives. I&rsquo;m urging people to minimize the time spent on these when they&rsquo;re not critical to their most important goals. <br /> <br /> <strong>What's the key to using the 80/20 rule, or Pareto Principle, on a daily basis? </strong><br /><br />Everything we talked about starts with this: if you don&rsquo;t know what your priority of the year is and how that translates to this week, you&rsquo;re not going to know what&rsquo;s important to you. A shocking number of people don&rsquo;t do that. Even the people who do never compare how they&rsquo;re using time as compared to their goals.</p>
<p>If you go through those two exercises <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Productivity-Results-Reduce-ebook/dp/B007HBLNSS">I mention in my book</a>, you'll get a lot more focused on what&rsquo;s important and discover what you should and shouldn&rsquo;t be doing.</p>
<p>At the end of the day, it all comes down to getting the goals right and understanding how much time you&rsquo;re spending on tasks, and trying to figure out where your comparative advantage is as a leader vs. as a producer &ndash; and what only you can do as a leader.</p>
<h4>NOW READ: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/tips-for-better-productivity-2012-11">14 Ways To Dramatically Increase Productivity </a></h4><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/robert-pozen-maximizing-productivity-while-scaling-2013-1#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p> http://www.businessinsider.com/radical-transparency-in-small-business-2013-1Radical Transparency Makes Employees Happier, More Productive And Loyalhttp://www.businessinsider.com/radical-transparency-in-small-business-2013-1
Tue, 15 Jan 2013 13:03:41 -0500Max Nisen
<p><img style="float:right;" src="http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/50f55d77ecad04187d000005-400-300/window-8.jpg" border="0" alt="Window" width="400" height="300" /></p><p>At small businesses and startups, there can be a clear division between what the founder knows and what his employees do, even if they spend all day working in close quarters. Often, there's not a leadership team, but just a leader, someone who unilaterally makes decisions about hiring, salary, and the direction of the business.</p>
<p>That can create problems, like when people start comparing salaries,&nbsp;<span style="line-height: 1.5em;">and even reduce employee motivation because they feel undervalued and disconnected from the company. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">One big idea that a number of companies are trying is going in the opposite direction entirely, becoming completely, radically transparent.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">One example is <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/this-company-discloses-everyones-salary-so-that-no-one-freaks-out-2012-6">Boulder, Colorado based Namaste Solar</a>, a solar panel installation company, which keeps all salary information transparent and available to employees.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><span>"Usually, salary is an emotional and sticky situation," co-founder and CEO Blake Jones says. "They have an emotional impact on all of us and in the end, people actually waste more time and energy wondering how much Bob or Jill is making and thinking the worst."</span></span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><span>Every employee at the company has the opportunity to become a co-owner, to buy stock and a voting right. Changes to company policies, including compensation, have to be approved by a unanimous vote of the whole board, which consists of almost every employee.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">"We're all employee owners, and we love it," Jones says. "We wanted to have an elite team that's going to contribute. When you have different people weighing in with different decisions, you create this team-oriented, open environment."</span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&nbsp;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="https://sumall.com/">New York based startup SumAll</a>, which provides data analytics for small businesses, does something similar.&nbsp;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/reveal-everyones-salary-at-the-company-2012-10">They also reveal everybody's salaries</a>, and take it a step further, revealing the company's entire capital structure. Everybody knows how much of the company is owned by each employee, and how much is owned by investors.</span></p>
<p>"When you hide your cap table, it's one of the easiest evils to do in your life," Atkinson says. "You can&nbsp;tell an employee that they have a huge amount of value and options but you don&rsquo;t tell them the total allocation of the company ... and it hurts somebody else."</p>
<p>It means you have to explain salaries and equity stakes, and collaborate on those decisions. But once you explain it, it's over. You don't run into situations where somebody finds out a peer has a higher salary, is angry or confused, but has no open way to communicate about it.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Founder and CEO Dane Atkinson <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/reveal-everyones-salary-at-the-company-2012-10">told Business Insider</a> that transparency and shared decision making have helped him hold on to top talent.</span></p>
<p>"Most of our team has refused offers from&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/google" class="hidden_link">Google</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/facebook" class="hidden_link">Facebook</a>&nbsp;and whatnot in the last few months," Atkinson says. "They are unshakable because once they get that sense of&nbsp;being part of a family and that openness in a company, it's really hard to go away from it."&nbsp;</p>
<p>"We just want to be the counterpoint to the corporate culture that&rsquo;s out there. We want to help people understand that there are other ways to build successful organizations," Atkinson says. "You don&rsquo;t have to fight over information and be overly protective. If you are open and you do take this route, it can work and it&rsquo;s been working very well for us."</p>
<p>It's an idea that can apply to pretty much any decision or strategy, and saves a great deal of time. When people know why something's happening, and have all the information they could possibly want or need, they don't waste time repeatedly going back to their boss with questions that they could have answered for themselves at a more transparent company.&nbsp;</p>
<p>In The Collaboration Imperative, <a href="http://www.strategy-business.com/article/ac00040?pg=all">Ron Ricci and Carl Wiese write:</a>&nbsp;</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span>When you&rsquo;re open and transparent about the answers to three questions &mdash; who made the decision, who is accountable for the outcomes of the decision, and is that accountability real &mdash; people in organizations spend far less time questioning how or why a decision was made. Think of how much time is wasted ferreting out details when a decision is made and communicated because the people who are affected don&rsquo;t know who made the decision or who is accountable for its consequences.</span></p>
<p><span>People that know <em>why</em> something's being done perform better than people simply told to carry out a task.</span></p>
<p>That doesn't mean this is easy, or that transparency's like a switch you can flip on and instantly motivate employees. When new information's revealed, there's going to be a flurry of questions and a lot of necessary explanation. When decision making is collaborative, it sometimes takes longer.</p>
<p>"It's very, very different than anything else. I have to spend a lot more time selling things to people," SumAll CEO <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/being-ceo-at-a-transparent-company-2012-11">Dane Atkinson told us.</a>&nbsp;"I have to explain things because it's not just me making the decisions. So sometimes it takes a bit longer for me to get things off the ground. That's especially true for things like cap tables, accretion and dilution, the sort of venture capital stuff I usually would have handled on my own."</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It's a hard decision for a business, and one that requires a lot of sacrifice and effort from those at the top. But there are few things more effective at making people feel like part of a company and able to talk about concerns and frustrations, rather than keeping them secret. &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;</span></p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/radical-transparency-in-small-business-2013-1#comments">Join the conversation about this story &#187;</a></p>